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Using Tesseract OCR with Python

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Re: Using Tesseract OCR with Python

#31
I created a set of Python bindings to Tesseract a couple of years ago. While not complete, they would likely make a great starting point for anyone wanting to interface with it at a deeper level. Reminds me, I should do some modernization work on it. https://github.com/blindsightcorp/tesserpy

Re: Using Tesseract OCR with Python

#34
post #13

Teaseract is ok printed material that's neatly organized, but other than that it seems the only other programmatic ocr is google cloud vision. It's a hundred times better, but unfortunately I need to OCR documents I can't contractual show the mighty G

In the "better than Tesseract" category is also Microsoft Azure OCR (not as good as Google) and the OCR.space OCR API (also not as good as Google, but 100* times cheaper/free, and supports PDF). The best - and most expensive - solution is still Abbyy OCR. They provide an SDK than can be used locally. A new local OCR solution is Anyline.io, but I have not used them yet.

I'm trying to read things like street signs, speed limits, store names, from not-necessarily-axis-aligned pictures - so far it seems only Google OCR can do those (and does them quite well). Is Abbyy worth trying for that use?

Re: Using Tesseract OCR with Python

#35
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the "better than Tesseract" category is also Microsoft Azure OCR (not as good as Google) and the OCR.space OCR API (also not as good as Google, but 100* times cheaper/free, and supports PDF). The best - and most expensive - solution is still Abbyy OCR. They provide an SDK than can be used locally. A new local OCR solution is Anyline.io, but I have not used them yet.

I'm trying to read things like street signs, speed limits, store names, from not-necessarily-axis-aligned pictures - so far it seems only Google OCR can do those (and does them quite well). Is Abbyy worth trying for that use?

No API, but mapillary is doing that with machine learning:

http://blog.mapillary.com/product/2017/02/06/towards-global-...

It seems likely that Google is doing something similar.

Re: Using Tesseract OCR with Python

#36
post #2

If you plan on using tesseract definitely try out their 4.0 beta, which uses LSTMs. https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/4.0-with-LST...

From the Wiki,

> The Tesseract 4.00 neural network subsystem is integrated into Tesseract as a line recognizer.

The LSTM is used in layout analysis, not in character recognition.

Re: Using Tesseract OCR with Python

#37

I'm combining opencv and pytesseract in order to process some scanned forms. Doing this I was able to link 70k forms to a database previously filled by professional typists. Now I have a huge data set I can use to train ML algorithms, I'm experimenting with several of them. I have no formal training in CV, so my impression is that recognition is relatively easy, the hard thing is the preprocessing need in order to no…

There's a number of steps you'll need to figure out. for the 70k forms, where do the fields come from. Then for every scan, finding the bounding box for every field in a somewhat automated manner. You can use histograms and blob detection to help out with a number of these.

Once you have thresholded text boxes that are quite legible, you can train your CNN's and LSTMS to read text from images.

Re: Using Tesseract OCR with Python

#39
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the "better than Tesseract" category is also Microsoft Azure OCR (not as good as Google) and the OCR.space OCR API (also not as good as Google, but 100* times cheaper/free, and supports PDF). The best - and most expensive - solution is still Abbyy OCR. They provide an SDK than can be used locally. A new local OCR solution is Anyline.io, but I have not used them yet.

I'm trying to read things like street signs, speed limits, store names, from not-necessarily-axis-aligned pictures - so far it seems only Google OCR can do those (and does them quite well). Is Abbyy worth trying for that use?

I can probably help you with that, send me an email.

Re: Using Tesseract OCR with Python

#40

We are trying automate the entire loan application and processing. So, this involved a lot of character recognition stuff as our target group have their financial documents as hard copies. Helping them autofill their information would make their task easier as well as avoid human errors while typing. So, after reading a few articles, I first designed a OCR using google’s OCR library tesseract. The classifier produced…

is this for US banks ? I'm assuming not. > It provided us the coordinates of all the texts and all we had to do was look for texts similar to an Account number and IFSC from a cheque book. Using some regex it was easy to find closely matching strings Could you explain what you mean by this ? We are trying to read shopping receipts, but I have ZERO background in image processing... so have been trying to figure out wh…

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